Third Estate Sunday Review: Senate Veterans Affairs Committee

Third Estate Sunday Review: Senate Veterans Affairs Committee

Message #11804 of 11805 < Prev | Next >

Meeting of the Research Advisory Committee
on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses

June 28-29, 2010
Veterans Administration, 810 Vermont Avenue, Washington, DC

Agenda Monday, June 28, 2010
8:00 – 8:30 Informal gathering, coffee
8:30 – 8:35 Welcome, introductory remarks Mr. Jim Binns, Chairman
Res Adv Cmte Gulf War Illnesses
8:35 – 9:30 Case report: long-term cognitive COL Jonathan Newmark
sequelae of sarin exposure Joint Program Executive Office for
Chemical/Biological Defense
Department of Defense
9:30 – 10:15 Effects of military service on the brain Dr. Michael Weiner
San Francisco VA Medical Center
10:15 – 10:30 Break
10:30 – 11:15 Organophosphate exposure and cognition: Dr. Alvin Terry
Novel mechanisms of neurotoxicity Medical College of Georgia
11:15 – 12:00 Neural Stem cell dysfunction and its Dr. Ashok Shetty
implications on memory and mood in a Durham VA Medical Center
rat model of Gulf-War illness
12:00 – 12:45 Proteomic analysis of cellular response to Dr. Michael Mullan
Biological warfare agents and cognitive Tampa VA Medical Center
function in animal models Dr. Fiona Crawford
Roskamp Institute
12:45 - 1:45 Lunch
1:45 - 2:30 ALS rates in Gulf War veterans Dr. Ronnie Horner
University of Cincinnati
2:30 – 3:15 Magneto-encephalography (MEG) Dr. Apostolos Georgopoulos
patterns in neurological diseases Minneapolis VA Medical Center
3:15 – 3:30 Break
3:30 - 4:30 Committee Discussion: VA Gulf War Mr. Jim Binns, Chairman
Task Force Report Dr. Kimberly Sullivan
Res Adv Cmte Gulf War Illnesses
4:30 – 5:00 Public comment
Meeting of the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses

Military shifts on reproductive health

Comrades --there was a time, when I was processed from the WAC corp to all volunteer service 1974 and this information was not available to me and I want you have to have it। Jagmedic

In November, the Pentagon’s Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee voted to include Plan B, a two-pill emergency contraceptive, and the generic Next Choice on the basic core formulary, a list of drugs all military facilities must stock. The Pentagon accepted the recommendation in February.

The military frames the decision as purely pragmatic, meant to standardize the stock available at hospitals across the globe. The Pentagon had made Plan B available to military women in 1999, when the Food and Drug Administration approved it as a prescription drug, but had not required that all hospitals stock the product.


“This move is ... consistent with the military health system goal to ensure that our beneficiaries have access to the appropriate medications for their health care needs, irrespective of location,” said Cynthia Smith, a Department of Defense spokeswoman.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38641.html#ixzz0rXFrgv26

Gulf War Illness: The Future for Dissatisfied Veterans

July 27, 2010, 10:00 AM Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
http://veterans.house.gov/hearings/hearing.aspx?NewsID=538
Gulf War Illness: The Future for Dissatisfied Veterans
Room 334 Cannon House Office Building

GW Veterans and supporters:

Well, here we go again. What is promised in the past has little to do with reality.

The full HVAC was supposed to step in on the Gulf War hearing. Now its back to being held by the subcommittee again that had canceled two times before.

Guess what? Same damn line up as before Pro government hearing with certain vets missing from that lineup Why? Because the handful of opportunist in our ranks are trying to help rig the hearing. Same three groups speaking for GW vets, who attend meetings Yet fail to report the GW vets what was presented, in a timely manner. When too much time has pasted for GW vets/supporters outside of Washington, D.C. to submit input or comments.

This will let VA off the hook, make DOD look good, give the IOM charte blanc, and keep the same tired faces at the front doing the same tired mistakes they have made the last 10 years. That goes for the half ass advocates who helped get UT Southwesterns funding that lead to the collapse of the research crowd. More of the same? I warned them in 2005, and no one listened.

The whole thing has gotten so old. Month after month of stalling until VA can finally get its pro-psychiatric program in place. The (VA-GWVI) Task Force that was supposed to help us instead produced a ghastly document that was a step back 14 years. Now that same task force wants to do things same as before until the public comments said it wasn't working. However, after talking with them they took what was 250 pages of public comments and distilled it to 100.

Anecdotal comments? Yes, there were allot of those. But, there were good ones too. That will be published right before the hearing in July as will the GWVIS reports. If its published at all.

What is missing is all that visibility we heard about. The GWVITF works in secret, with no website or way to follow that they do. That happened before when they produced that pro-government document. We are to trust that to set policy when it does so in a really sneaky way. This mirrors the DHWG program and methods for the past 10 years.

None of this is going well. None of this should be trusted. A small handful of people are trying to make policy that the rest of us should have a say in. Yet, as in the past we are in the dark. Some promise on Obama's behalf of the most transparent government in history. This regime is even more secretive than the last.

The hearing in July is yet another farce, and should not be trusted. What is missing from the hearing are those dissatisfied veterans that are a part of this like me. If KL is not requested there, then this it to let the ACGWV -VBA - and others off the hook that KL tangled with much of 2008 and 2009 while on a federal committee. The GWVIS report would not be changing if KL had not called attention to it and it took 4months to even get that on the books with VA and my committee, subcommittee, and so on.

You watch, the people who know me well and a long time have seen my prediction rates. For real change to happen you have to do something different, and we have too many people here who are one trick ponies.

Veterans for Common Sense
National Gulf War Resource Center
Veterans for Modern Warfare
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
Desert Storm Battle Registry

(ACGWV) means VA-Advisory Committe on Gulf War Veterans
(GHWG) Deployment Health Working Group
said Jagmedic

Brain Scans Depict Gulf War Syndrome Damage

SALT LAKE CITY — Nearly two decades after vets began returning from the Middle East complaining of Gulf War Syndrome, the federal government has yet to formally accept that their vague jumble of symptoms constitutes a legitimate illness. Here, at the Society of Toxicology annual meeting, yesterday, researchers rolled out a host of brain images — various types of magnetic-resonance scans and brain-wave measurements — that they say graphically and unambiguously depict Gulf War Syndrome.
Or syndromes.

Since the early 1990s, some 175,000 U.S. troops have returned from service in the first Gulf War reporting a host of vague complaints, notes Richard Briggs, a physical chemist at UT Southwestern involved in the new imaging. Their symptoms ranged from mental confusion, difficulty concentrating, attacks of sudden vertigo and intense uncontrollable mood swings to extreme fatigue and sometimes numbness — or the opposite, constant body pain.

In healthy vets and those suffering from syndrome one, blood flow to affected regions of the brain diminished, although not comparably; the drop in syndrome-one vets was about five times that in the healthy men. But among individuals suffering from Gulf War syndromes two and three, blood flow inappropriately spiked after administration of the drug.

Other tests probed for faults in the integrity of the circuitry connecting deep gray matter — where the brain performs unconscious calculations and processing — with the layer of white matter that performs conscious reasoning. In vets with syndrome two, the most seriously ill of the groups, a special form of scans showed signs that the insulating sheath covering the “wires” connecting the gray and white-matter regions was seriously impaired.

Concludes Briggs: “This tells us very clearly that in the syndrome twos — unlike either of the other syndromes, or the controls — their wiring is flawed.”